Thursday, July 17, 2008

Thing #7 - Flickr?!? I hardly knowr!


Polar(ized) Ice III, originally uploaded by Iridesce.

Here's a photo I took in a place I consider my "extended classroom," the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It's a view of water crystals viewed through a polarized lens. Rainbows! Yay!

I have used Flickr for years for its wonderful social networking abilities and ease of use. I keep some school photos on there; if they feature students, they're listed as private -- if you see any students, please let me know! -- mainly for my own media storage. I'm not sure if I'll use it for public classroom photos (if I did, I'd have to create a new user, since I don't want my kids/their families seeing my personal stuff).

Right now, I have my wedding pictures catalogued and hope to make a big book (though Flickr's service) soon. Overall, I love having photos "out there" - photography has been a great hobby. I hope to keep it going in the future.

I've tried Picasa, a long time ago, because it meshed with Blogger first. My early blog days had a few Picasa-loaded photos, but Flickr arrived and was superior then. Honestly, I haven't looked at other sharing sites in a long time. I hate it when they make you sign up as a user before you can look at others' photos; Flickr is open and free.

And, they have the Explore function! You can find out what the most popular tags are (displayed in a cool wordswarm), or find photos deemed "interesting" by their online traffic.

Maybe I'll use Flickr in the classroom as a vocabulary-building exercise; kids can enter vocab words and see what kinds of tags show up!

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